Emeli Sandé’s ‘Long Live the Angels’ Is Uncluttered and Strong

Longing, pain, loneliness and a need to believe pour out of “Long Live the Angels,” the second album by the Scottish singer Emeli Sandé. It’s a clear, accomplished cry from the heart, exorcising its sorrows by declaring them bluntly. “Loving you the way I do — it hurts,” she belts in “Hurts,” the album’s first single and one of its very few up-tempo songs, a burst of post-breakup rage and recrimination propelled by relentless handclaps and cinematic orchestral crescendos.

Emeli Sandé - "Hurts"CreditVideo by EmeliSandeVEVO

Ms. Sandé had Britain’s best-selling album of 2012 with her debut, “Our Version of Events,” which introduced her strengths: a voice with tearful intensity, songwriting that goes directly to the point and productions that are well aware of both R&B’s gospel-rooted history and 21st-century dance-music technology, not to mention the examples of Adele and Alicia Keys.

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“Long Live the Angels” is the Scottish singer Emeli Sandé’s second album.

But in hindsight, the album also had a debutante’s nervous eagerness; it was full of arrangements and vocals that held a few more flourishes than they needed. In the four years between albums, Ms. Sandé took time to step away from pop’s promotional treadmill; she also divorced.

Her return is lucid and uncluttered, placing all the expressiveness of her voice at its center. Ms. Sandé could easily oversing; she has delicacy, volume, graininess, melismas and sly, rhythmic nuances whenever she needs them. But she inhabits her songs rather than overpowering them.

Many of her new songs ponder spirituality while the music makes gospel connections. “Give Me Something” asks for “something to believe in” as churchy organ chords waft in; “Sweet Architect” melds a torch song and a piano hymn.

Most of the songs begin with Ms. Sandé singing quietly above a hushed, echoey backdrop. And some of them stay there, deliberately exposed and vulnerable, like “Selah,” which longs for a spiritual rebirth above the harmonies of a distant, wordless choir, or “Right Now,” which sets her voice trembling above a lone electric guitar as she makes a simple, increasingly anxious plea: “Don’t you dare say tomorrow,” she sings. “I need you to love me right now.”

When the big buildups come, they’re fully earned. “Breathing Underwater” boosts Ms. Sandé with a gospel choir as she testifies, almost incredulously, to finding strength in spirituality. “Tenderly” hints at Ms. Sandé’s Zambian ancestry, with syncopated guitar and Afropop horns carrying a call for love.

In “Happen,” she sings about the tentative beginning of a romance as a kind of prayer; it opens with her almost whispering over a bluesy guitar and sustained strings but eventually soars to a higher octave as she sings an ecstatic affirmation: “This one feels like it just might happen, happen to me.”

In “I’d Rather Not,” she firmly rebuffs an ex’s offer to get back together; what starts as a gentle R&B ballad works itself up to a full indictment by the time she declares, “When it was good it was amazing, but the bad was devastating.” And “Lonely” holds back until it finally lets loose an arena-country chorus near the end.

Intertwining love, faith and music, as Ms. Sandé does through much of the album, is a time-tested idea. But it’s also an abiding and deserving one, especially when it’s carried off with such unfailing grace.